Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 2:35 pm Post subject: Advice about the mixing the two (HS/PS)

Perhaps this has been discussed on another thread, but I'm new and haven't found it yet, so I'll ask:

We're considering homeschooling our twins through elementary school and then sending them to PS for jr. high and high school. My reasoning is that middle school & high school will offer more educational choices. Elementary school is just too 'one size fits all' for us.

Does anyone have advice or experience about doing both? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

I'm sure it's probably normal to freak out about the idea of homeschooling. I have a number of concerns and yes, the ugly socialization word pops into play... No matter how many articles and posts I read about it, the nagging voice in my head won't shut up. UGH!

I have a number of concerns and yes, the ugly socialization word pops into play... No matter how many articles and posts I read about it, the nagging voice in my head won't shut up. UGH!

I think all of us had that nagging notion when we first started. Once you get into it and you see how many different activities your child is into and how many different people they run into that they wouldn't normally run into due to being in school all day, those fears will subside.

I don't have any advice or experience about homeschooling elementary and sending to public school for middle and senior high - my kids are just starting elementary. However, I know people who are homeschooling teens and they're doing wonderfully and I love homeschooling so much that I don't see myself sending my kids to school at any point. Your mileage may vary, but I'd give homeschooling a shot. You may love it enough to not ever want to send your kids back. There's so many resources for homeschoolers out there today, I understand it's possible to get a teen a good, solid high school education at home.

Good luck!_________________To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

I have done both and am currently in the process of gathering information to determine whether or not I should return to homeschooling two of my three children.

I homeschooled first. Acclimating a child to the rank and file system of the institutional school is a challenge. Some teachers understood and made allowances because my kids were brought up with individualised curriculums and were allowed to work at their own pace. Other teachers disparaged me and my children.

The fact is that the teachers are required to keep their classrooms working at an even keel. Kids who do not meet the classroom average, either above or below, will be pressured to work at the same level as the national average.

My children were also required to learn the skills which make classroom management easy for teachers. This is an obvious necessity for a teacher obligated to teach 26 to 30 students per class. Individual attention is not a daily occurence. You will hear things from teachers like, "your child is incapable of working independently" and "your child needs a lot of handholding" This doesn't mean that a homeschooled child manner of learning with individualised support is a fallback to him/her as a person. It just illustrates the point that children who are in a school classroom are conditioned to work alone from day one. Personally, independence in learning comes naturally to kids as they grow, or so I've witnessed in my own boys, but classroom management is made simpler when the kids learn not to rely on teacher assistance, even when they have difficulty understanding the lesson.

Don't think that your obligations to teach your child at home will lessen if you send your child to school. In fact, I have found that they increase. There is a greater amount of taxing on your time, on doing copied rote work and homework pages, projects and other. When a project is sent home, don't think that your child is expected to do his/her own work. I have had teachers tell me "off the record" that they fully expect parents to do the main of the project work, and the kids do the frills like drawing and coloring. Doing pages of homework everyday, after your child has already spent 6 hours at school is taxing, and requires consistency and time and patience to work with an elementary child who is already tired.

There is an unspoken rule of contacting teachers and other school officials at least once a week. Phone is okay about half the time, the other half of the time should be in person. If this is not done, your family may come under the heading of "people who don't care" about their kids, and this is a flag for some teachers that the child may be abused.

If your child sustains an injury which shows on the face or arms or hands, the parent must call the school and tell the secretary or nurse or teacher. If you don't, they will call you and question you about it. They are obligatory reporters to the social services, and regardless of whether they think personally the child is abused, they are required by the law to report repeated suspicions.

Clothing is an issue as well. Worn clothes, faded and patched jeans, shoes that still fit perfectly well but look raggy are no nos. Again, this is is considered a flag to spot a potentially abused or neglected child.

Socialization in the school can be a helpful thing, for I have found that my kids bow down to authoritative figures much more easily and quickly. They have also been learning the art of keeping their thoughts to themselves, clamming up basically, and knowing when to say things and when not to. However, the down side is that my authority with my kids seems to have fallen a notch. I think this is because they are so tired after school from holding all their emotions inside that when they come home they need a serious release/come down time after being around all those people. As for getting along with other kids and making friends-that hasn't been an issue for us ever. My kids run the block and have always found making friends of all ages easy.

Those are a few quick thoughts, and I'm sure I can think of other things I've had to deal with over the past 3 years. Hope it helps.

So you're saying that if you send your kids to school, you shouldn't expect the teacher to spend any significant amount of time with them, and you should expect to have to do a lot of supplementary work at home yourself? What exactly is the point of school, then? Sounds to me like you're doing all the work anyway.

The teacher to student ratio is the school's fault, you shouldn't have to do most of the teaching yourself. If you are doing most of the teaching, school is just a glorified daycare center, and you're basically dooming your children to at least several hours of wasted time per day._________________Homeschool Articles - Events - Support Groups

So you're saying that if you send your kids to school, you shouldn't expect the teacher to spend any significant amount of time with them, and you should expect to have to do a lot of supplementary work at home yourself? What exactly is the point of school, then? Sounds to me like you're doing all the work anyway.

The teacher to student ratio is the school's fault, you shouldn't have to do most of the teaching yourself. If you are doing most of the teaching, school is just a glorified daycare center, and you're basically dooming your children to at least several hours of wasted time per day.

Unfortunately, what you posted has been basically true in my experience with my younger 2 boys. My eldest son, who is in junior high, does all of his traditional book learning and homework at school, but this is only because he doesn't like doing school assignments at home. He gets plenty of homework.

I happen to agree that school is a form of babysitting; a conditioning center to raise mediocre thinkers and conspicuous consumers. I put my kids in public school because after the death of my husband I came under a great deal of social and familial pressure. Because of my impaired emotional state, I buckled, and did what everyone else said was the right thing to do. It was a mistake, because it opened up a can of worms. We were bombarded by a slew of problems it would take volumes to explain.

According to the school, my kids are "doing better every year"-or, in reality, they are becoming conditioned to fulfill state expectations of being average in all things in life. I am not happy about this, but I have to admit, with all the problems we have faced with the schools, the kids have managed to pick up basic learning and some good life skills. Or it simply could be that they are growing and these changes came as they developed.

It could have been worse. I could have lost my kids, because-well, bereaved widows/single moms with children fall under high risk statistics and non-compliance with state mandated morals is just horrible!

Sorry to sound bitter-but the last 3 years have been difficult. Making the decision to have a show down with the school system next fall is not an easy one, and I don't know how ready I am for it.

Lemmons, Thank you for sharing such a poignant experience. The concerns expressed here mirror my concerns exactly. I was a public school teacher for 6 years before we had kids and I must say that I feel completely unprepared to educate my own children. I am questioning everything I learned and believed and did as a teacher. I have no doubt that we will homeschool through elementary school, I just don't know when or if they should be exposed to 'the system.' You've given me lots to think about, thank you.

Jodi, my family's original plan was to homeschool the boys when they reached junior highschool age. After my husband passed away, I waited one year, then sent my eldest son to school in the 6th grade. That year there weren't too many problems. In the 7th grade things became more difficult.

Socialization in school for my eldest son was a breeze, but in the 6th grade his teachers expressed concern because he tended to enjoy hanging out with the girls. Previous to his school experience, he was hanging out with both boys and girls (in fact his 2 best friends were a boy and a girl) and at home he continued to socialize with both genders. I asked him why he preferred to hang out with the girls at school and his reason was because "the boys at school act like idiots".

In the 7th grade my son began to hang out with more boys. Nothing wrong with that, but the behaviors of some of these boys have put my family at risk. We had the police come visit our home one evening in relation to one boy. Another boy spread a vicious rumor about my son, the kind of rumor that, if not squelched immediately, could cause police or social workers to come over and question and basically waste our time and cause stress while doing it.

Again, the complaints about rank and file and lack of school conditioning were part of the picture.

The morning routine-getting a teen-aged boy up in the morning when his internal, biological need is for 12 to 14 hours of sleep a day-that was a very difficult period. After the first 2 months of school the warning buzzers started going off in my brain, and I knew truancy issues would come up. I called the school and requested help from the vice principal-maybe a talk with my son or something simple like that. He refused to help. Not until the issue came to become what the schools call serious delinquency did they get involved. I was threatened with jail. My son was threatened with probation and a permanent record of delinquency. Near the end of the school year my father died-all 3 of my boys missed three weeks of school (I was there for the last 2 weeks of his life, nursing him-then a week for the funeral and to be there for my mom-we live near 400 miles away from family).

After missing the three weeks the truancy pressure stepped up and I was forced to put him into social diversion-a social program to redirect "bad" kids into the "right" direction. Because of statistics, my kid was labeled a trouble maker. All he really needed was the right to sleep in an extra hour. I was told the following by various teachers and the principal and social workers: "We know that all the studies show that kids this age really need extra sleep, and they tend to sleep in and function poorly when they aren't allowed to sleep as long as they need, but school starts at 7:30am because of bus scheduling needs."

Yep. Buses are more important than kids' biological needs.

Efficiency of the teachers was mostly good. Out of 7 teachers my son only had one that misplaced papers, made him redo work he had already completed, and resented his critical thinking skills. By the end of the year, he had won her over. His grades were honor roll, even with all the "truancy".

Education wise, he says that he is learning things he was taught the year before-that everything that is covered has been taught already. He gets frustrated because the teachers repeat their instructions over and over again, give the same lectures five days in a row, and the learning is boring and rote. Teachers have admitted to him and the other students that the same lessons are repeated every year, with minor increase in depth of subject, but no real details or delving into a subject because of time and curriculum restrictions, and state and federal regulations. He laughed because he was learning the exact same things his little brother (3rd grade) was learning.

It has become a learning experience for him because he has realised that in some subjects he knows more than his teachers, he sees that he is not afraid to talk to teachers as if they are regular human beings (which he has gotten into trouble for) and that other kids resent and are suspicious of teachers and other authority figures. He understands from the inside how a government system works, and he sees the flaws.

Even with this, he wants to continue with school, regardless of the boredom, the repeated lessons, the dull homework and the unnaturalness of certain school rules-he wants to hang out with his friends. School is a big social get together for kids, and from what I've seen in my eldest son, that's the only real thing they get out of it.

My son has reached the age where his friends seem more important to him than his family. I think that is normal for teens, and while I will tolerate this in a phase, I will not allow it to get to the point where his friends will replace his family. Nothing can replace family, and he simply lacks the experience to believe that knowledge.

This is going to sound a bit outlandish, but from what I have seen and watched my son experience, parents get a lot of lip service from teachers and principals about how important it is for parents to be involved with their kid's schooling, but it is so very difficult to become involved in any meaningful way-as an individual, unique, special, bringing one's own gifts and abilities to make a positive change. It's because of the heavy reliance on state and federal regulations-this schedule needs to be fulfilled, that curriculum needs to be followed, these monies need to be granted, that teacher has tenure, that aide is bound under contract-and the continual passing the buck...it stops nowhere, because no one person is fully responsible.

The people who run my son's school are powerless to stop it. Deep inside her heart, his principal knows he's not a troublemaker, but she has her attendance records, which are reviewed every year, and she doesn't want to lose her job. Neither do the teachers, or the liason officer lose his position. When there are warning signs that a kid is having trouble in school, the vice principal may ignore it because ther are kids who are full-blown into trouble and there are too many students to mind.

I swear, my kids have been educated, gelded, innoculated and graded like beef cattle. Instead of a diploma, they should get a red FDA stamp on their foreheads. But here I go-starting to preach. If I could redo things, I would not have put my son in school until he was ready for the 9th grade. I wanted him to learn about the system and how it works, but he was too young to become a victim of it. Still, he's got enough confidence and knowledge to fight the conditioning-he's shocked the teachers many times with his mature and educated responses-but there is something deeply depressing about teaching your child to buckle under rules and regs that have no basis in human engineering.

Anyway, I think I've babbled enough. Wish I had a better experience to share with you, but there's no helping it I guess. In my experience, the school thang has definitely been a mixed bag. Socialization of my eldest son has meant bending his will to the will of the school, and hanging out with kids who have brought troubles to our home. (And I thought I was being careful about who I let him hang out with!) He's learned some harsh realities, but I worry because of his age, his teen-aged angst, and the way boys in his age group all seem to get into trouble one way or another. I notice that when we shut out the world and hang out alone as a family, he seems to be at peace and happy, and his teeny bopper attitude melts away. It's such a tough age-for him and for me too!

Hello all!
Our 12 yr old spec needs daughter has been hs and ps. For 7th gr I will hs for language Arts and Social studies. She will have a spec math class and science(her favorite)at school. Our older 2 are mid twenties so she is pretty much by herself and is very social and looks forward to going to school. But the reading material is still grade level and I end up reading much to her anyway so I might as well hs her for that. My small school district is wonderful and the district superintendent is supportive and willing to work with us. She is also ordering the science text in audio for her. I plan on using "Drive Through History" , a video/wrkbook curriculum for her also. This should be interesting and we're both looking forward to it.
Happy 4th of July everybody!